ter of
darkness, farewell!"

This bewildering speech was received with admiring awe, and we departed.
I should have liked to hear the comments on us which passed that evening
among the gypsy denizens of Mammy Sauerkraut's Row.

V. A GYPSY LETTER.

All the gypsies in the country are not upon the roads. Many of them live
in houses, and that very respectably, nay, even aristocratically. Yea,
and it may be, O reader, that thou hast met them and knowest them not,
any more than thou knowest many other deep secrets of the hearts and
lives of those who live around thee. Dark are the ways of the Romany,
strange his paths, even when reclaimed from the tent and the van. It is,
however, intelligible enough that the Rom converted to the true faith of
broadcloth garments by Poole, or dresses by Worth, as well as to the holy
gospel of daily baths and _savon au violet_, should say as little as
possible of his origin. For the majority of the world being snobs, they
continually insist that all blood unlike their own is base, and the child
of the _kalorat_, knowing this, sayeth naught, and ever carefully keeps
the lid of silence on the pot of his birth. And as no being that ever
was, is, or will be ever enjoyed holding a secret, playing a part, or
otherwise entering into the deepest mystery of life--which is to make a
joke of it--so thoroughly as a gypsy, it follows that the being
respectable has to him a raciness and drollery and pungency and point
which passeth faith. It has often occurred to me, and the older I grow
the more I find it true, that the _real_ pleasure which bank presidents,
moral politicians, not a few clergymen, and most other highly
representative good men take in having a high character is the exquisite
secret consciousness of its being utterly undeserved. They love acting.
Let no man say that the love of the drama is founded on the artificial or
sham. I have heard the Reverend Histriomastix war and batter this on the
pulpit; but the utterance _per se_ was an actual, living lie. He was
acting while he preached. Love or hunger is not more an innate passion
than acting. The child in the nursery, the savage by the Nyanza or in
Alaska, the multitude of great cities, all love to bemask and seem what
they are not. Crush out carnivals and masked balls and theatres, and lo,
you! the disguising and acting and masking show themselves in the whole
community. Mawworm and Aminidab Sleek then play a role in ev